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Amazon are currently doing a slightly special deal for Books 1 - 5 in the SSS series. Here's the link if you are so inclined:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07NZXH9B3/
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Here are the links for the book which kicked everything off!
US: https://www.amazon.com/DIRTY-PAWS-SHORT-SHARP-SHOCKS-ebook/dp/B07DKS85HM/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/DIRTY-PAWS-SHORT-SHARP-SHOCKS-ebook/dp/B07DKS85HM/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/DIRTY-SHORT-SHARP-SHOCKS-English-ebook/dp/B07DKS85HM/ Here are the links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/Beasties-Other-Stories-Short-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLCJGV7/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beasties-Other-Stories-Short-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLCJGV7/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Beasties-Other-Stories-Shocks-English-ebook/dp/B07NLCJGV7/ Here are the links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/Monster-Beach-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NNV2LZH/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Monster-Beach-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NNV2LZH/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Monster-Beach-Short-Shocks-English-ebook/dp/B07NNV2LZH/ Here are the links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/Asylum-Shadows-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLD1K57/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asylum-Shadows-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLD1K57/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Asylum-Shadows-Short-Shocks-English-ebook/dp/B07NLD1K57/ Here are the links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Ribbon-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLMDND9/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Ribbon-Short-Sharp-Shocks-ebook/dp/B07NLMDND9/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Stranger-Ribbon-Short-Shocks-English-ebook/dp/B07NLMDND9/ Here's the ordering links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/Patient-Short-Sharp-Shocks-Book-ebook/dp/B07NLC17QN/ UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Patient-Short-Sharp-Shocks-Book-ebook/dp/B07NLC17QN/ FR: https://www.amazon.fr/Patient-Short-Sharp-Shocks-English-ebook/dp/B07NLC17QN/ It's all go here at Demain - as we gear ourselves up for the first books (to be launched March 1st 2019) - we can confirm the next six have been signed up and will be published at the end of March. Adrian has again created some amazing pieces of art for the covers. More details as the weeks progress but here's a taster:
Book 6: Every Moon Atrocious - Emile-Louis Tomas Jouvet Book 7: A Monster Met -Liz Tuckwell Book 8: The Intruders & Other Stories - Jason D. Brawn Book 9: The Other - David Youngquist Book 10: Symphony Of Blood - Leah Crowley Book 11: Shattered - Anthony Watson Without a doubt artist (and writer!) Adrian has been responsible for the Demain branding - as such, he created a new cover for the WWW1 / horror themed The Darkest Battlefield ebook. For a couple of pounds / bucks / euros - it's more than worth checking out (with some cracking stories by Paul Edwards, Terry Grimwood, Richard Farren Barber, Anthony Watson, John Gilbert and Adrian Chamberlin)
UK LINK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darkest-Battlefield-Paul-Edwards-ebook/dp/B07KCLHCGF/ US LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Darkest-Battlefield-Paul-Edwards-ebook/dp/B07KCLHCGF/ FR LINK: https://www.amazon.fr/Darkest-Battlefield-English-Paul-Edwards-ebook/dp/B07KCLHCGF/ Dean M. Drinkel and Martin Richmond met over Twitter, talked about films, talked about books and talked about their mutual love of horror. Very quickly a lasting friendship was built – Dean spoke about the SHORT SHARP SHOCKS! Series, Martin said he might have something suitable and as such Book 5 - BEASTIES & OTHER STORIES was born.
DEMAIN PUBLISHING: Always great to speak to you Martin – so let’s get down to it. Can you tell us about BEASTIES? MARTIN RICHMOND: Hello! Three different stories make up BEASTIES & OTHER STORIES but each produce a creeping terror, each in their own world but all located in Scotland. BEASTIES itself arose partially from my dislike of wind turbines and pylons that continue to blight the country’s beautiful landscape, but the spark came from a friend recalling how his younger brother, living on a farm, described the animals. Sheep were baa beasties and cows were moo beasties and this made me think that they are a silent terror we take for granted! FRIGHTEN ME delves into a horror writer’s view that ghosts are only fiction and a rational man cannot be frightened. I came up with this simply from considering that a ghost writer isn’t just someone who writes work for someone else. THROUGH A STAINED GLASS EYE delves into the thought I had of what I could see if I looked through the eyes of a figure in a church’s tall, stained glass window? Maybe something I wasn’t supposed to see? DP: I found your stories particularly atmospheric and think I learnt quite a lot…did you face any specific challenges when writing them? MR: The only challenges I had with writing these were mostly around how they would sound when read to an audience and how they would react? I read one myself to an audience and received good feedback but it wasn’t till I heard an actress read out BEASTIES that I knew I had got it right. My wife applauded and she’s a tough critic. DP: I’m not always a great fan of an author reading out their own work – I’ve seen some terrible failures over the years but if you’re in a position to bring in an actor / actress it can truly be a sublime moment. My first piece of theatre was a monologue of a medieval story (inspired by a true story as it happened) I’d written, I was able to hire a French actress and she performed (with me directing) the piece at a theatre in London. We’d had a couple of rehearsals but boy she was able to take that story to a whole different level and seeing the audience’s reaction…ah, happy times. Where any of the stories in BEASTIES based on real events? MR: None of the stories were but the locations were certainly real. I always place myself in the headspace of the main character to enable me to say, ‘what would I do? DP: With your writing in general do you find anything specifically challenging? MR: Getting a grasp on natural dialogue can be a challenge, especially when I’m dealing with local accents and how they transfer to the page? DP: That’s so true and if you’re not careful if can end up a terrific mess. If I remember rightly there is a book by Mark Morris which is written totally in a ‘local accent’ – it takes a little while to get used to it but after that…it is a very clever book…I’ll have to check that out now in case my mind is playing tricks with me and I made all that up…as a writer, who / what are your influences? MR: A particular influence in my taste in books was undoubtedly the PAN books of horror stories. I bought them year after year since they first came out and the different styles from the different authors gave me a lifelong love of short stories. Then the short story volumes of Alfred Hitchcock presents, such as Stories not for the nervous and Stories they wouldn’t let me do on TV really put me in my comfort zone. A specific author is difficult to say but if I was pushed I have to say I am in awe of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories and also Edgar Allan Poe with his icy Cask of Amontillado. DP: Oh I haven’t read that last one I believe, I’ll have to check it out. So 2019 is shaping up nicely for you creatively – can you talk about what you’re currently working on? MR: I have several screenplays in competition, some short, some long, in the UK and in the USA, some horror, some comedy drama. But primarily I am deep in a full length, portmanteau, horror, screenplay in partnership with you (Dean M Drinkel)! DP: That’s true – and so far it’s going very well isn’t it ha ha…but that’s a discussion for another time….tell us, you ever suffer from the dreaded Writer’s Block? MR: I prefer to call it Writer’s Wall, it’s a better description when the lack of words hit me and I’m butting my head against a wall. To cope with it I put the work aside and do something entirely different, like gardening or painting, (the type with an easel) then when I come back to it I can see through the holes in the wall, dislodge the bricks and break through it. If anything, I can’t get the words down fast enough when I get going, but I always put pen to paper before hitting the keyboard. DP: Intriguing…so do you outline your stories / screenplays before you start? MR: Sometimes I outline my ideas, especially if I’m not sure where it’s going, but mostly I have to attack it from start to finish and then do a hundred rewrites. DP: Yeap, I’d say that was generally my method too. I’m working on a tv script right now which I actually finished within the three weeks target I set myself…however as it is a ‘spec’ script I’ve now started labouring over almost every word and I’ve done probably near to 30 rewrites…it’s a weird process for me as if each and every word has to be 100% right before I can move onto the next one…there is some kind of a poetry to it all I guess or I could just be talking pretentious twaddle ha ha – I’m enjoying the actual script though and hopefully something positive will come of it so all that ‘bleeding into the typewriter’ will be more than worth it. Like me you a horror aficionado… MR: That’s the genre I tend to feel most at home with but I do dabble in science fiction. Not your Star Wars sci-fi but a more earthly based take on the subject. My book The Trapdoor to Murder includes a touch of science fiction in amongst the plethora of murder stories and nobody leaves the planet. DP: Okay, so we’re off to pitch the project to a film producer…go for it: MR: A familiar, isolated farmhouse draws Jess to discover why it’s young family vanished? A child’s recorded voice reveals the terrifying events and that the horror is still there. DP: Like it and if you were writing a synopsis.. MR: Three unsettling stories make up BEASTIES & OTHER STORIES. The first BEASTIES deals with Jess chancing upon a farmhouse in Scotland she’d encountered some years before, only to find the place is now wrecked and deserted. She explores and finds a tape recorder with a young boy’s voice explaining about the ‘terrifying beasties’. FRIGHTEN ME centres around a horror fiction writer who doesn’t believe in ghosts. He discovers some things cannot be explained and are more terrifying than the writer within him could ever imagine. THROUGH A STAINED GLASS EYE has a young man buying a church in the Scottish Highlands that comes with a graveyard and its inhabitants. He then discovers, while cleaning the stained glass windows that some glass should never be looked through. DP: Well done, well done…tell us something surprising about Martin Richmond if you would. MR: I was born in York and moved to Scotland where I joined the Scottish Prison Service. Thank you Martin – best of luck with BEASTIES & OTHER STORIES out on 1st March in ebook…and always a pleasure to speak to you my friend… If you want to connect directly with Martin: Twitter - @hitchcocked |
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April 2023
AuthorDean M. Drinkel |